Raymond L. Cox
[Raymond L. Cox, a frequent contributor to BIBLE AND SPADE, is pastor of the Salem, Oregon Foursquare Church. He has traveled extensively in Bible lands and has written over 1650 articles on biblical and archaeological subjects. In addition, he is the author of four books.]
Pergamum is mentioned in only one Biblical context. The church there was one of seven in the province of Asia to which Jesus addressed messages in the early chapters of the book of Revelation. The King James Version translates the name “Pergamos,” for what reason no one has ever satisfactorily explained. The proper rendering is “Pergamum.”
The church at Pergamum had been ministering for some decades when Jesus directed the apostle John, “To the angel of the church in Pergamum write..” (Revelation 2:12). The “angel” is generally understood to be the pastor. How did the gospel get to this heathen mecca?
There were Jews from the Roman proconsular province of Asia in the audience to which Peter preached on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem (cf. Acts 2:9). Perhaps some of them were among the 3,000 converts to Christ on that occasion. After the feast they would return to their hometowns. Since Pergamum vied with Ephesus for recognition as the leading town in the province, it’s likely that a few at least of its citizens took back the new faith to their neighbors.
Or perhaps the church was planted at Pergamum during the first two years of Paul’s residence at Ephesus during his third missionary journey. All the citizens of Pergamum heard the gospel then, for Luke reports “All they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks” (Acts 19:10).
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Pergamum’s ruins tower in Turkey today, but in New Testament times this whole area was inhabited by Greeks who never were rivalled as a race of colonists until the British came along. A few Greeks hung on into the 1920’s at the site where the Turkish town is now called Bergama (Turks often change P to B) which echoes the ancient name, and a church functioned there for centuries. But the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey deported the aliens and with them the last Christians.
The first time I visited Pergamum I purchased a bus ticket for the 75 mile trip from Izmir (biblical Smyrna) for the equivalent of 38 cents! That was ten years ago. Even now costs in Turkey are rock-bottom, as the Turks devalue their Lira whenever America’s dollar drops in value. I had a delicious lunch of lamb, rice, stuffed tomato, french fries, and bottled water for less than a quarter! Of course, that Bergama “Resotran” wasn’t classy in its premises!
The first glimpse of Pergamum strikes the visitor with wonder. Its acropolis soars 1,000 feet high atop a conical mountain which reminded Helen Hill Miller of the legendary exaggeration of the palace of King Priam at Troy. She called the site “colossal Hellenistic Pergamum” (p. 41, Bridge to Asia, Scribners, New York).
My second visit to Pergamum brought me by rented car from Assos where Paul had walked from Troas while Luke and Timothy and others of his party had sailed between the same towns.1 Assos struck me as a miniature Pergamum, for it towers high, though its site is the cone of an extinct volcano, with several terraces climbing its steep slopes. But Pergamum commands far more Biblical importance.
Here Jesus addressed a church plagued with several serious problems. The pagan environment was more sinister than in other heathen cities in the province. Jesus recognized that its Christians lived in a place where in a special way “Satan dwelleth” (Revelation 2:13). Indeed, Christ declared that Pergamum was a place “where Satan’s seat is” (ibid).
But the church’s greatest threats were internal. Persecution from the outside could only kill believers’ bodies. I searched in vain for the ruins of the huge stadium the Romans built near the Asclepion (a temple-hospital complex dedicated to the “doctor god” Asclepius).
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The monument appears on maps in my guidebooks and likely is the place where the Christian Jesus called, “Antipas, my faithful martyr” (Revelation 2:13) was slain at Pergamum. The Lord’s reiteration about Satan’s residence in the same verse indicates that Antipas’ martyrdom was spearheaded by partisans connected with the local institution which Jesus designated as “Satan’s seat” or throne. I couldn’t find anything resembling stadium ruins in the vicinity indicated on the maps. I made three trips to the local museum before the director arrived that morning. He told me that the stadium is still buried, “beneath houses.” Someday he hopes to have money to move the peasants and excavate the monument where, when the devil did his worst against Antipas, the faithful martyr by death won the crown of life!
Outward persecution usually helps the gospel more than hinders. Did not Tertullian exult that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church? “Satan’s seat” and fury wasn’t nearly so serious a threat to the church as was corruption on the inside. Jesus diagnosed two dangers. “Thou hast them that hold the doctrine of Balaam who taught Balac to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication” (Revelation 2:14). The Pergamum church also tolerated “them that hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans,” Jesus charged, “which thing I hate” (Revelation 2:15).
Archaeology has not helped us to understand these two internal menaces to the purity of the faith, but excavators have almost certainly identified what Jesus meant when he said, “I know… where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is” (Revelation 2:13). Jesus used the term thronos and the most literal translation would read, “where the throne of Satan is.” Moffatt has it, “Where Satan sits enthroned.”
Today you can see more of Satan’s “throne” in East Berlin than at its original site on a terrace below Pergamum’s exalted acropolis. Virtually all of the ancient marble friezes which decorated the monument were crated off to Germany by the archaeologists who discovered them in the 1870’s.
But Pergamum offers other spectacular attractions. Its celebrated library of over 200,000 volumes is long gone. Mark Antony pirated it as a gift for Cleopatra to take the place of the famed library of Alexandria which fire destroyed. Literary rivalry between Pergamum and Alexandria thus ended in the Egyptian city’s favor. Years before,
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A model of the Altar of Zeus in the Bergama museum.
the Egyptians had established an embargo against exporting papyrus to Pergamum in order to slow down the Pergamum kings’ acquisition of literature which threatened Alexandria’s preeminence. But the Greeks developed a substitute, inventing parchment. “They wrote on the skins of their goats and sheep and endowed the new material with their city’s name,” relates Helen Miller (op. cit. p. 233). The Greek word for parchment is pergamene and the Latin term pergamena. I saw no parchment at Bergama, but in other museums numerous New Testament manuscripts penned on this material are on exhibition.
Pergamum’s archaeological remains sprawl in three areas, with the most imposing decorating the conical hill. The “Red Basilica” which some identify with the New Testament church of the city — an almost certainly erroneous attribution — stands in the modern town spreading southward from the acropolis. The third archaeological area is the Asclepion, about two miles south of the acropolis.
It’s best to drive or taxi to the top of the acropolis and then walk down through the four main terraces which hang on the hillside. At the very top I found the temple of the wine-god Dionysus. The steepest theatre in the world descends, almost in the shape of a slice of pie, on the northeast face of the mountain. The upper agora, on a
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lower terrace, is one place early Christians certainly propogated their faith. Here believers from Ephesus buttonholed virtually every citizen, for those first century “fishers of men” dropped their lines where the “fish” were. Most citizens frequented the marketplaces often. I passed through gates and studied walls which stood when the letter from Jesus to the church here arrived. But the major point of interest had to be the Altar of Zeus, the monument archaeology identifies as “Satan’s throne.”
Only the foundations of this massive shrine remain, which Pergamemeking Eumenes II constructed to commemorate his victory over the Galatians. Long before the idolatrous altar arose Pergamum was a virtual capital of paganism, for here the high priests of the Babylonian mystery religions reestablished themselves after Cyrus expelled them from Babylon following Belshazzar’s feast which was a dinner dedicated to those heathen gods. The apostasy of the tower of Babel thus persisted in a direct line to Pergamum.
Helen Miller called this monument “Pergamum’s contribution to the Seven Wonders” of the ancient world (p. 239, op. cit). Ekrem Akurgal described it as “the largest and most impressive example of a Greek altar” (p. 87, Ancient Civilizations and Ruins of Turkey, Hasbet Kitabevi, Istanbul). Its sculptured friezes which framed the perimeter dramatized a mythological battle between gods and giants.
The site of the altar of Zeus in the left foreground with Bergama in the distance.
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But Antipas and Pergamum’s other Christians spearheaded by faithful witness a faith which eventually unseated both Satan and Zeus from the religious dominance they had exercised at Pergamum for generations.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is more than a match for any opposing force. The gates of hell cannot prevail against the church, so long as the church remains true to its Founder. That is why Jesus exhorted so earnestly the believers at Pergamum not to compromise their faith. And that is why believers today must maintain diligence and “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3).
(For more information on Pergamum, see Bible and Spade, Spring 1976, pp. 43-53. — Ed.)
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